- Paperback: 272 pages
- Publisher: Grafton; paperback / softback edition (7 May 1992)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0586214968
- ISBN-13: 978-0586214961
- Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 1.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 924,665 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
There is something perverse about a story of hi-tech high adventure which not only insists on describing the damaged childhood of the heroine in quietly sinister detail, but holds the attention while it does so. Simon Ings' first novel has a charismatically neurotic protagonist--a lapsed Islamic cyborg with a defective exoskeleton nostalgic for the extra senses that the authorities have taken away. She was part of a military force that saved the world once, from the angry Artificial Intelligence Moonwolf, but she is reduced to making blue movies to get access to exotic sensory equipment. And no matter how badly the authorities have behaved, they will always need you when the Earth is in danger again... This is less a cyberpunk novel than one which shares some of the same noirish preoccupations as cyberpunk--AI, the extension of human senses, strange virtual realities--in this case a decrepit seaside resort that is also a lesbian paradise of wistfulness and good coffeeshops. And the heroine does come through, and the world does get saved, but this was never going to be a book that ended otherwise. Hot Head is a remarkable debut, full of startling imagery and set pieces of bizarrely inventive action. --Roz Kaveney
Synopsis
Artificial intelligence probes have been sent into the solar system to mine planets inaccessible to man. The operation has, on the whole, proved to be highly successful, until the AIs stop communicating with Earth. Instead they start to replicate and begin a war with Earth.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'This guy is incandescent' goes the cover blurb on my edition, which I picked up on spec in a motorway service station. The next day I had finished it and was in mourning that there was no more. Ings paints a jagged and terrifying picture of our future. At our fingertips is brain compatable hardware, (datafat), von Neuman self replicating machines and easy space travel. We also have dead seas, shattered cities and sinister conspiracies. Same old same old us with nasty new toys. There are, naturally, also aliens in this book, like much science fiction. And like most Sci-fi there is speculation on what an alien intelligence is like. Ings' gives these aliens a motive and a means to be a very threatening presence throughout the book. The difference is that these aliens are as much a by product of human technology as nuclear waste is a by product of nuclear power. It's just that nuclear waste is more benign... Malise, the central character is as damged and twisted as the broken landscape she inhabits, gifted, but not in control of those gifts. This is a starkly and dangerously imagined, hecticly paced vision. Read it and hope it doesn't happen...
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
1 of 3 people found the following review helpful
A promising debut
1 Aug 2003
Format:Paperback
Hothead is post-cyberpunk fiction, like Neil Stephenson's _Snow Crash_. Both novels deal in themes raised by Gibson et. al., but in here Simon takes the mileu and stretches it out onto a third world political canvas while Stephenson poked at it with the satire stick. The novel sputters a bit in the front as Simon info dumps the background of his protagonist, Malise. But as he warms up to his subject, and as the novel moves into the "present" line of the story rather than Malise's past, Simon hits stride. Many writers have toyed with the human/software implant (best done in Effinger's _When Gravity Fails_, I feel), but Simon's able to make it new here. Possibly it's because he realizes that it (the technology) is not the story (even though the novel is named after it), but a part of the story. This novel could as easily have been titled _Moonwolf_ (but, then, that sounds slightly like a horror or fantasy novel, doesn't it?). I was thrown off a bit by the sudden impact of the ending, but I think that was due more to my start-n-stop reading method than any fault of Simon's.
I did have one other comment. I ran across something early in the book-- I think it was about walking and falling--that reminded me of Laurie Anderson. I thought it mere coincidence until I came across:
"Do you want to go home?" they said, "Do you want to go home now?"
Which I can't place, but it's somewhere in _United States Live_ ("Walk the Dog"?). Given this novel, and the fact that he quotes Laurie Anderson, how can I help but look for Simon's next?
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